Speakers

Dayoung Lee is an Associate Partner and a co-lead of the Education to Employment Practice at Dalberg, an impact-driven strategic advisory firm with offices in over 20 countries worldwide. Based in Mumbai, she leads many engagements across Asia to empower women and children. She focuses on strategy and policy development, innovative finance and Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (MEL). Her recent work includes assessing the cost effectiveness of education interventions in India, landscaping school networks globally to understand how they can be most effective, and assessing the impacts of COVID on student learning in India with UNICEF. She has deep experience in outcomes-based financing models – she has been leading the performance management of the Quality Education India Development Impact Bond, and has led feasibility studies of such mechanisms in health. She has supported the strategy development of India’s leading life skills organizations and supported state governments to adopt technology for improving education and livelihoods. Prior to Dalberg, she was a consultant with Parthenon (now EY-Parthenon).

Dr. Gustafsson-Wright is a Senior Fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution. Her current focus on effective delivery of social services including education and health interventions in developing countries has consolidated her role as a global expert on innovative financing mechanisms including payment by results, public-private partnerships and impact investing.

She is the premier thought-leader and convener in the field of social and development impact bonds and has written over a dozen publications on this cutting-edge topic including a recent series of policy briefs, which examine the success of impact bonds over the past ten years. With over 20 years of experience in development, her career has primarily focused on applied microeconomic research in human development with regional foci in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean including conducting numerous impact evaluations. 

Her previous professional experience includes working at the World Bank, the UNICEF Innocenti Research Center, and as Senior Researcher with the Amsterdam Institute for International Development (AIID). Dr. Gustafsson-Wright holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Tinbergen Institute at the University of Amsterdam, as well as Masters of Science in Applied Economics and Finance and Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is regularly cited in the media including in the Economist, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals as well as contributed to several books in her field.

He has nearly a decade of consulting experience in the development and private sector settings across India, South-East Asia, and Asia-Pacific. His focus areas include strategy, investing for development, blended finance, education, and fostering inclusive and sustainable private sector participation.

His recent work includes design and performance management of one of the largest impact bonds in education globally (Quality Education India DIB), determining the cost-effectiveness of education interventions in India, developing the growth strategy for an inclusive business focused on eye-care services, identifying ways to foster sustainable and inclusive private sector participation in two low-income economies Asia / Asia Pacific. He also helped conduct a strategic review of a large foundation’s program focused on improving education to employment outcomes of 1 million underprivileged women in India and developing a youth employment and entrepreneurship strategy for a low-income country in South East Asia.

Prior to joining Dalberg, Gagandeep was a part of the CEO’s office team at HCL technologies, where he worked with the leadership team in designing and implementing strategic initiatives for the organization. Gagandeep was also a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) where he worked with firms in the Industrial Goods and Automotive industries to develop their international expansion and growth strategies. Gagandeep holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow and a Bachelor’s in Computer Science & Engineering from Thapar University..

Krisha leads the British Asian Trust's work in social finance in India and Bangladesh and has over 10 years of experience spanning strategy consulting, financial services, healthcare delivery, gender, livelihoods and social impact. Previously, she co-founded Clinic Didi - a nurse-led rural healthcare model that aims to improve care delivery in existing public clinics at the last mile. She has also led the India Health portfolio at the Institute for Transformative Technologies, a technology incubator seeded at the University of Berkeley. She also has worked with Dalberg Advisors in India, working multiple sectors – including gender, livelihoods and technology, and at McKinsey & Company with a focus on corporate and investment Banking markets in the Asia region. She was the recipient of the Citi Woman Leader Award in 2014.

Mara is an Economist and Decision Analyst and holds degrees from Bocconi University in Milan and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research is motivated by a desire to improve decision making in government, with a special interest and extensive expertise in the field of healthcare. Mara is one of the lead developers of the STAR toolkit, a socio-technical approach sponsored by the Health Foundation to improve resource allocation in healthcare organisations.

Mara has worked extensively with managers of the English and the Italian National Health Systems. She has also consulted for the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care in Ontario (Canada), the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence and the (then) Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in England, NATO and the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Milena Castellnou is Chief Programs Officer at the Education Outcomes Fund (EOF), a hosted trust fund at UNICEF, and co-lead EOF’s Program Team. Prior to joining EOF, Milena was an Associate Partner at Instiglio.

She has extensive experience in the design and implementation of Results-Based Financing (RBF) programs, including the first Social Impact Bond in a developing country, in Colombia, and a $10 million RBF program in employment for the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the Government of Morocco. She is currently overseeing EOF’s large scale outcomes fund in basic education in Sierra Leone and leads EOF’s work in skills-for-employment in several countries.

Milena holds an undergraduate and Master’s degree from Science Po Grenoble and an LLM in Public International Law from the University of Nottingham.

Grace Wood is Education Adviser for FCDO Ghana, leading UKAid policy and programmes to support the COVID-19 education response, basic education reforms, teacher education, girls’ education, out-of-school children, and partnerships between government and non-state actors.

From 2016-2018, she was Education Adviser for DFID Pakistan, leading UKAid work to support children with disabilities, education through non-state actors, and education advocacy. She previously held a range of UK-based roles in DFID, leading policy for the Girls Education Forum 2016, and UK support to GPE. She holds an MA in Education and International Development from UCL and a BA in English and Spanish from Durham University.